"Just one thing after another" - Unknown

Global Voices For Artists

I began by interviewing artists and entrepreneurs, looking for people with ideas — someone with a story to tell. It took time and I kept asking questions. Kept meeting people, looking straight at them, looking for that spark in their eyes, that wild excitement, someone burning to do something.

The one desire that emerged was to somehow put São Tomé e Príncipe on the world map for everyone to see

Coming from a tiny country myself I can empathize. In Estonia we're just over 1 million and I've felt what's it like to want to get to the big city. I always wanted to get my work out there to the world where it's happening as well. So an idea was born. To create a sort of a Global Voices for artists. An online magazine that would highlight awesome things created in places that remain under the radar of global media. Films, paintings, sculptures, and all sorts of creative projects.

We would publish stories with interesting people who are trying to make something happen, create value where there was nothing but people and an idea. We would do that all over the world, using a network of young people communicating over the Internet with Skype, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Just as Global Voices, the site would function as a resource for larger media to pick up stories. But instead of politics, the focus would be on the arts. We're in the very beginning, because this is nothing more than an idea in my head. Know someone you think would love working on this? Drop me a line

Trailer for my upcoming documentary, Tomé that inspired the idea. (Hint: go to the official website to see the subtitles.)

October 25, 2011

The Tomé iOS App Prototype is a tangible way to bring something like I descrived above into reality.

Building Tomé into a transmedia storyworld, I set out to create an iPad and iPhone app with Titanium Mobile that would feel like a narrative and flow naturally. The aim of a transmedia storyworld is to create a media franchise by telling one story over multiple platforms, with each platform contributing something unique, such as videos made out of the material that was not used in the main narrative. So the app is not only the website in an app form, but provides additional content to the storyworld.

Hollywood movie franchises and global media franchises have been doing this for years. Look at the content added to Harry Potter, Transformers, Tron: Legacy, Avatar, and others. But it's uncommon in indie filmmaking. In any case, the iPad is for opening new ways for the audiences to discover Tomé by creating another entry point to bring them into the storyworld.

The App Storyline

I wanted to create a flow within the app, so I chose to make it work only with swipes; this the only way to control the app. To get this idea across, I first started out by sketching a rough storyline in Balsamiq.

The Mockup

The Assignment: 1) Create high-fidelity mockups of your application’s user interface 2) Link the screens together in a state transition diagram 3) Publish results on your team blog 4) Present results to other teams.

The App

The app is quite not ready for App Store yet however you can check out the app's website and see the source code on GitHub.